Human Behavior

Adversity and the Presidency

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Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Uses of   Adversity”    reinforces Michael Barone’s argument in  Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future.  Gladwell looks at difficulties:   poverty,  role as outsider,  such handicaps as dyslexia.    And he, too,  concludes that hard makes strong.   Gladwell’s rift is inspired by  The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs, by Charles Ellis.   Gladwell’s focus is on   the first seventy pages, which follow  the ascent of Sidney Weinberg.   Bluffing his way into a janitorial job, Weinberg moves upward to run and enlarge the investment firm.   Language can be telling.   When the United States moved from governing the plural verb “are” to the singular “is”, Lincoln had won, more surely than with Lee’s signature at Appomattox or the golden spike connecting east with west.   Gladwell points to a changed idiom:   “Nowadays, we don’t learn from poverty, we escape from poverty.”   We valued hard; now, easy is default.   Still, our leaders emphasize their trials McCain’s in the Hanoi Hilton; Obama’s alienation  as  African-American.   They expect  respect  for overcoming difficulties; we give it, in part, I suspect, because we still believe that hard does, indeed, make strong.  

 

[Update:   November 11 – if anyone is still reading this far into our column.]   The ever helpful A&L Daily links to  Jason Zengerle’s lengthy piece on Gladwell, Geek Pop Star.   The lengthy portrait discusses his new book, The Outliers.    Zengerle credits Gladwell with the  uncontroversial observation that  success is not merely personal will but happenstate;  this writer seems less impressed by the hardening than reducing the losers damaged in the hardening process.  Hard can be good – it can also, of course, debilitate.   It is not an accident or even a surprise to any observer of human nature that a disproportionate number of quite successful businessmen are dyslexic – nor that a disproportionate number of felons are.  )

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It Is Called “Dope”

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I didn’t have much of an opinion about illegal drugs back when I started to work for the police.

Oh, I had heard the arguments in favor of legalizing all drugs. This was back in the early 1990s, and our prisons were beginning to fill due to the so-called “War on Drugs”. Legalization advocates would point out that the economic cost of illegal drugs would be extremely low if they were suddenly acceptable. All the crime, violence, and social costs that came from addiction would disappear if the price wasn’t artificially inflated. Remove the drug laws and remove the profit incentive for gang bangers and pushers to do war in the streets. Make drugs cheap and there wouldn’t be any reason for junkies to commit crimes to feed their habit.

Like I said, I had heard the arguments in favor of legalization but had yet to form an opinion. Then I started to meet junkies up close and personal.

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Western Medicine and Number Gut Follow Up

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The past few years my mother had been feeling fatigued.   The condition kept getting worse and she finally went to a doctor.   To make a long story short, the mitral valve  on her heart was compromised, and the heart was not able to fully function.

Yesterday she had open heart surgery.   Everything went great.   The didn’t know until they opened her up if they were going to be able to repair the valve or replace it.     They prefer to repair it, but in this case it was damaged too much.   It was replaced with a valve made of tissue from a pig.   Really!   She will be walking through the hospital hallways TODAY (albeit very slowly), a mere 24 hours after the surgery.   I  am simply amazed at this.  

As a joke my dad is going to purchase a small pig trough and place it in their bedroom for my mom to see when she gets home from the hospital.   That is how  my family  rolls – we always make  jokes in tough or  stressful situations.   I think the hard Midwest winters darken our sense of humor.

As an interesting aside, the valve was damaged not because of a genetic defect, but from disease (this was good news for me).   The doctor proposed that my mother had rheumatic fever as a child and that this was the cause of the valve being compromised.  

It has been a stressful week for me, as there was a 1%-2% (between one and two percent)  chance that my mother could have died on the operating  table.   We are very thankful that everything went well.

Over the last week I have been thinking of Shannon’s posts about parents that don’t give their children vaccines because of quack science,  and people  not having any sort of decent number gut.

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You Should Be Ashamed!

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Mickey Kaus is a Liberal who will actually try to find out the facts. Kudos to him for that.

But he does occasionally descend into Left wing incoherence. A prime example is a short post entitled Ride My See-Saw. (Click on this link, and scroll down to the post at the 1:21 PM mark.)

Mr. Kaus is taken with the concept of “vertical ticket splitters”, people who don’t automatically cast all of their votes for one party. He attributes their motivation for doing this to guilt. People might vote for Obama in this election, but then carefully cast their remaining votes for Republicans because they feel guilty about…

Well, I’m not really sure why anyone feels guilt. Mr. Kaus seems to think that the bad feelings all flow from racism.

“M suggested that voters (especially white, swing voters) who don’t vote for Obama may feel guilty about it and compensate by voting for Democrats in downballot races (Senate and Congress). But the converse of this theory is equally interesting–voters who do pick Obama, may compensate or hedge for what they feel is a bold, guilt-expiating risk by picking Republicans downballot.”

(snip)

“…more people will be vertical ticket splitters because of the presence of Obama, who is not only an African American candidate–whom you might feel guilty about not picking–but a relatively unknown candidate whom you might want to hedge against, especially if you voted for him to avoid feeling guilty about not picking him (and then felt guilty about that).”

(An attempt was made to keep the original emphasis intact. The above is how Mr. Kaus wants you to see his work.)

This seems extremely odd to me. If someone is a racist, then by definition they genuinely believe that a person’s race disqualifies them in some way. Makes the minority candidate unable to do a decent job simply because of their heritage, so to speak.

Seen in this light, it becomes obvious that racists are not going to be effected in any way by guilty feelings. Why would anyone, racist or otherwise, feel guilty about voting for what they see as the more capable choice? If anything, racists would feel pride in voting for their prejudices because they would think that they are acting for the greater good. So why go on and on about how racists would feel guilt?

The constant harping on racism from the Left during this election appears to me to have two root causes.

It seems to me that one cause is pure projection from Liberals. They are going to vote for Obama not because they genuinely believe him to be the best qualified for the job, but due to some bizarre self loathing. White guilt, if you will. Since guilt is the most powerful motivator when they make their political choices, it seems obvious to them that everyone else must also have simmering pools of white hot shame bubbling just beneath the surface. If people just listened to the voice in their heads that said they must make up for being a piece of crap, then everyone would make the same choice. The correct choice!

The other is a cynical attempt to manipulate swing voters, a propaganda effort to make the Bradley Effect work for the Democrats. If swing voters can be convinced that they will be perceived as racists by voting for anyone other than Obama, maybe a significant percentage will vote for the candidate that they would otherwise feel is too inexperienced to handle the job. Pretty much force people to vote for the least qualified candidate.

I must confess, dear reader, that it makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable to climb up on my analyst’s couch and try to plumb the mental depths of complete strangers. Not only am I obviously unqualified, it also strikes me as the height of arrogance to even try. But I feel justified since the Left in general, and Mr. Kaus specifically, are not constrained to keep to their area of expertise.

To close, I would have to say that the only people who should be feeling guilty are the Liberals who scream “Racism!” at the drop of a hat. Have they no shame?

(Hat tip to Glenn.)

Outblogging the MSM

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I belong to an internet group called the UCF, who started out as members of John Scalzi‘s Wateveresque forum until an army of trolls came in and set up residence in that once-fine space. We gradually retreated to our own blogs and set up an online community for ourselves. Most of us are aspiring writers, all of us are science fiction fans, and we’re all a little goofy, but that’s about where the similarity ends. We run the political spectrum from socialist to me. There is a lawyer, a film and TV location manager, an administrative assistant at JPL, and editor for Linux Journal, several other IT professionals of various stripes, an architect, a marine biologist, and a former Navy Chief Warrant turned writer and woodworker, among others (oh yeah, and me, a chemist). Over time, I’ve come to regard all of them as friends, although I’ve only met two of them in meatspace.

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